The invention relates generally to the field of organizational information and, more particularly, to an approach for identifying, organizing, displaying, and utilizing the roles, people, and relationships that exist in an organization.
Humans organize themselves into cooperative groups and organizations such as companies, joint ventures, partnerships, trusts, project teams, human families, clubs, unions, societies, political parties, governments, charitable organizations, and armies. Whether of a personal, professional, or political nature, each such organization involves contributors who are affiliated with the organization by birth, invitation, employment, or voluntary involvement. Contributors occupy various roles in the governance, management, operations, and administration of the organization.
The roles and the contributors who occupy them interact with each other within the context of relationships. These relationships, whether formally defined as part of an established hierarchy or informally agreed upon based on a pattern of interactions, involve delegation of activities and tasks that are undertaken on behalf of the organization. The activities and tasks may be assigned to and/or performed by a contributor based on their role within the organization or their particular skill set or qualifications. People may be affiliated with an organization as members or as external contributors, and their designated role may reflect this status. For example, a member of a company may be a manager or an officer while an external contributor may be an independent contractor or a consultant.
In each such organization, there is a need to organize and visualize the various contributors, roles, and relationships to ensure efficiency in the organization's operations and management. To this end, organizations typically create and use hierarchical organization charts and trees containing visual depictions. Organizations may also create and use various other types of depictions of themselves in the form of relationship diagrams, task descriptions, project plans and other similar graphical and illustrative views, apart from organization charts and family trees. In some organizations, these tools are designed by a central authority within the organization to which such work has been expressly assigned either as an ongoing role or as a one-time task. In other organizations, the task of creating these tools is dispersed to the various groups, departments, and divisions within the organization, each of which creates and maintains a semi-independent visualization of its own group, department, or division. In either case, a diagrammer or diagrammers typically administer a top-down process of creating visualizations depicting the relationships that comprise an entire organization, group, department, or division.
Although the top-down nature of such processes is intended to ensure structural consistency and design efficiency, such currently used tools and approaches result in visualizations that are often flawed in various respects. Moreover, recent developments in law, technology, and commerce have highlighted the deficiencies of existing approaches to modeling organizational relationships and further diminished their utility. Organizations are now facing new demands on how they build their cultures, how they collect and make available information relating to their hierarchy and management structure, and how they ensure the well-being and safety of their contributors. Regulatory and other legal requirements relating to the governance and internal control processes employed by organizations have increased significantly in recent years. In addition, organizations are facing new pressures and opportunities to form external collaborations, to foster internal collaboration or mentorship, to outsource work and operate globally, and to utilize new technologies for communication inside and outside the organization.
One flaw in visualizations produced by current methods is that the visualization content may be incomplete or inaccurate, either as to the displayed contributors, which displayed relationships are shown, or what displayed attributes are part of the visualization. This may result from the diagrammer not having access to or not receiving all the necessary input information, since in many cases only the internal contributors themselves know or have access to such input information but do not communicate it to the diagrammer. This problem is amplified by the top-down nature of the current methods of creating and maintaining visualizations, which in some cases deters internal contributors from either noticing or communicating errors in their personal relationships and data. Current visualization processes typically do not provide an easy way to verify individual relationships and data through the individuals directly involved or to document their validation within the visualizations.
In other instances, visualizations that may have been correct at the time they were created by the diagrammer shortly thereafter become, and remain, out of date as to the displayed contributors, relationships or attributes. This is due to the dynamic nature of every organization, with its changing internal contributors, the assignment of internal contributors to new positions or roles, and the projects and tasks of internal contributors being revised, newly implemented or terminated by the organization. When the ongoing maintenance or administration of the visualizations is assigned to one or a few individuals as the diagrammer(s), the accuracy of a visualization becomes subject to a diagrammer's ability to update, and/or a diagrammer's personal assumptions as to when and to what degree the visualization should be updated. Moreover, even when a human resources database is used to help capture input information for each internal contributor and to speed up visualization updates, it is often difficult for the diagrammer to stay informed with regard to informal changes and evolution in roles, relationships, responsibilities, and attributes within an internal contributor team or a group making up part of the whole organization. This is particularly true when such changes occur locally within a given working team. Also, even when a visualization is updated, it is difficult to determine which particular version or update of the visualization is complete and accurate during which period of time.
Another flaw of current, top-down procedures for creating visualizations is that they provide contributors with few or no options to specify and update the content of their own node or profile within the visualization. In addition to organizational information attributes that are standard and mandatory (e.g., company phone extension, company email address, office number, etc.), many contributors may wish to provide non-organizational attributes to make themselves more accessible and ease collaboration among contributors. For instance, a contributor may wish to provide personal contact attributes such as mobile phone numbers, links to profiles on social networking sites, and usernames on instant messaging systems, most of which are outside the control of the organization. This flaw has become more pressing as organizations increasingly have or interact with contributors who are mobile, working from home offices, remote locations and the like.
Still another deficiency or limitation in the visualizations produced by current methods is that they do not identify or provide information about the many relationships that an internal contributor may have with external contributors. Examples of such external contributors include collaborators on projects that are not part of the organization's core activities, service providers and suppliers that contribute to the organization's activities and operations, caretakers, professional advisors, and consultants. Since external contributors and/or their relationships with each internal contributor are often not listed in any formal database or otherwise identified by the organization's records, the diagrammer has little or no input information about their existence or nature to incorporate into the visualization. Alternatively, the diagrammer may not realize the importance or need for incorporating within the visualization the external contributors and their relationships with the organization's internal contributors, since the diagrammer does not know about and/or participate directly in such relationships.
An example of a visualization created by current, top-down approaches is illustrated in FIG. 1. The visualization may be drawn by a diagrammer using a drawing program or similar tool. The example of FIG. 1 includes an external consultant 110 and a “dotted line” relationship 102. The dotted line relationship 102 conveys that contributor Jan Man is a secondary supervisor to contributor Amy King in addition to her primary supervisor Clara Ida. To create such a chart, the diagrammer would have to be informed of, and manually add to the chart, both the relationship 102 and the contributions of the external consultant 110. The diagrammer would need to be aware of a relationship 104 between a coordinator 108 and the external consultant 110, even though the coordinator 108 actually supports many individuals in the organization and does not report to individual 106 from a human resources administration point of view. Moreover, the diagrammer would need to be aware and conscious of the subtle differences between seemingly similar internal relationships such as Clara Ida's primary supervisory relationship with Amy King and Jan Man's secondary supervisory relationship 102 with Amy King.
For these reasons, there is a need for an approach to managing organizational information that retains the advantages of the top-down design process while addressing the disadvantages of that process.